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Two Evolutions
2. Two evolutions Introduction The emergence of the ancient technologies was a process which is difficult to understand. Their practical character and teleological structure are undeniable, and yet they did not have any individual creators, inventors. The search for the sources of early technologies is a dangerous job. Effective technologies were usually "theoretically based" on the myth, on superstition: their application was either initiated by a magic ritual (e.g., medicinal herbs were supposed the owe their qualities to a formula which was spoken while they were collected or applicated) or they were the ritual in themselves, in which a practical element is inseparably interwoven with a mystical one (the ritual of shipbuilding, in which the production recipe is carried out liturgically). Concerning the awareness of the final result, today the structure of the intention of the community may approach the realization of the intentions of the individual; in the past this was not the case and we can speak of the technological intentions of the ancient societies only figuratively. The transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic age, the neolithic revolution, which is comparable to the atomic revolution with respect to its culture-forming qualities, was not initiated by some Einstein of the stone age which "had the idea" of agriculture and "convinced" his contemporaries to apply this new technique. That was an extremely slow process, taking the life span of many generations, a creeping transition from utilizing, as food, certain naturally occurring plants, through more intentional settling which replaced nomadism. The changes occurring during the life of a single generation practically equaled zero identically. In other words, each generation met technologies which were seemingly as unchanging and "natural" as sunrise and sunset. This type of emergence of technological methods did not totally vanish, because the culture-forming influence of every great technology reaches considerably farther than the life spans of generations, and therefore the structural, habitual, ethical consequences of these influences and the very direction in which they guide mankind, not only are beyond the conscious intentions of anybody, but effectively evade the awareness and determination of the nature of such influences. With this terrible (concerning the style, not the content) sentence we open a section which is dedicated to a metatheory of the gradients of technological evolution of man. "Meta" - because for the time being we will not talk about marking out its directions, nor will we determine the essence of its results, but discuss a more general, higher level phenomenon. Who causes what? Technology - us, or rather we - the technology? Does technology take us where it wants to, possibly even to doom, or are we able to force it to submit to our endeavor? But what, if not technological ideas, determines that endeavor? Is it always the same, or is the relationship "mankind - technology" subject to historical changes? If so, where does this unknown quantity tend to? Who will gain the upper hand, the strategic ground for civilizational maneuvers - mankind which can freely choose from an arsenal of technological means at its disposal, or rather technology which, by automation, crowns the process of expelling man from its spheres? Are there technologies which are imaginable but - unrealizable now and forever? What would determine such an impossibility - the structure of the world or our limitations? Is there another possible direction for civilizational development, apart from the technological one? Are we typical of the cosmos, are we normal - or an aberration? Let us try to find answers to these questions - although this search will not always give a unique result. As a starting point will serve a graphic chart classifying effectors, i.e., systems capable of acting, which Pierre de Latil included in his book Artificial Thinking [P. de Latil: Sztuczne mys´lenie. Warsaw 1958]. He distinguishes three main classes of effectors. To the first, the deterministic effectors, belong simple (like a hammer) and complex devices (adding machine, classical machines) as well as devices coupled to the environment (but without feedback) - e.g. automatic fire alarm. The second class, organized effectors, includes systems with feedback: machines with built-in determinism of action (automatic regulators, e.g., steam engine), machines with variable goals of action (externally conditioned, e.g., electronic brains) and self-programming machines (system capable of self-organization). To the latter group belong the animals and humans. One more degree of freedom can be found in systems which are capable, in order to achieve their goals, to change themselves (de Latil calls this the freedom of the "who", meaning that, while the organization and material of his body "is given" to man, systems of that higher type can - being restricted only with respect to the choice of the building material - radically reconstruct the organization of their own system: as an example may serve a living species during biological evolution). A hypothetical effector of an even higher degree also possesses the freedom of choice of the building material from which "it creates itself". De Latil suggests for such an effector with highest freedom - the mechanism of self-creation of cosmic matter according to Hoyle's theory. It is easy to see that a far less hypothetical and easily verifiable system of that kind is the technological evolution. It displays all the features of a system with feedback, programmed "from within", i.e., self-organizing, additionally equipped with freedom with respect to total self-reconstruction (like a living, evolving species) as well as with respect to the choice of the building material (since a technology has at its disposal everything the universe contains). I gave only a short summary of the classification of systems with increasing number of degrees of freedom of action as suggested by de Latil, removing from it some highly contestable details of the division. Before we go on to further considerations, it is probably not inappropriate to remark that the presented classification is not complete. One could imagine systems with yet another degree of freedom: for the choice of materials in the universe is necessarily limited by the "catalogue of goods" which are at disposal. However, a system is conceivable which, not satisfied with the range of available things, creates materials "beyond the catalogue", not yet existing in the universe. The theosophist might be inclined to take God for such a "self-organizing system with maximum freedom"; this hypothesis, however, is not indispensable to us, because we can assume, even on the basis of our modest contemporary knowledge, that the creation of "parts beyond the catalogue" (e.g., certain subatomic particles which "normally" do not occur in the universe) is possible. Why? Because the universe does not produce every possible material structure, and it is well known that it does not create, e.g. in stars, nor somewhere else, typewriters; nevertheless the "potential" for such devices is there - and the same, one can imagine, is true for phenomena concerning states of matter and energy in the supporting space-time which cannot be realized by the universe (at least not in the current phase of its existence). Similarities Nothing certain is known to us about the first beginnings of evolution. Exactly, however, do we know the dynamics of the emergence of a new species, from its birth, through culmination in its development, to decline. There are almost as many paths of evolution as there are species, but they have numerous characteristic properties in common. A new species comes into the world unnoticed. Its external appearance follows that of already existing species, and this borrowing seems to attest the inventive inertia of the Designer. Initially little seems to indicate that this radical change of internal organization, to which the species will owe its forthcoming ascendency, has in principle already been completed. The first representatives usually are tiny, they also possess a number of primitive properties, as if their birth was governed by hurry and uncertainty. For some time they vegetate almost hidden away, hardly withstanding the competition with species already existing for a long time and being perfectly adapted to the problems posed by the world. Until finally, after a change in the general equilibrium which is caused by seemingly minute displacements in the environment (and to the environment of a species belong not only the geological world, but also all other species living in it) the expansion of the new species begins to happen. Entering already occupied areas, it emphatically shows its superiority to the competitors in the struggle for existence. When, on the other hand, it reaches an empty space, not yet governed by someone else, it radially explodes, spreading out in an evolutionary radiation, initiating a whole range of varieties at the same time, in which the vanishing of the remainders of primitiveness is accompanied by a wealth of new structural solutions which more and more subordinate external shapes and new functions to themselves. In this way the species tends to the peak of its development, its name becoming representative for the whole epoch. The domination by land, by sea, and by air lasts a long time. Finally the homeostatic equilibrium gets disturbed again. This is not yet equal to defeat. The evolutionary dynamics of the species takes on new, hitherto unobserved qualities. The representatives in its main branch become gigantic, as if searching for rescue from the threat in giantism. At the same time evolutionary radiations appear, now often having the mark of hyperspecialization. The lateral branches are trying to penetrate into environments in which the competition is comparably weaker. This last maneuver is sometimes successful and in this case, when all traces from the giants produced by the core of the species to protect itself from defeat have long disappeared, when simultaneous efforts in the opposite direction have failed as well (for some shoots of the evolution in this same period tend to miniaturization) - the descendants of that lateral branch, having happily found favorable conditions deep within the peripheral area of the competition, persistently last in it almost without change, being the last evidence of the former richness and power of a species. I apologize for this slightly puffed-up style, this rhetoric which is not supported by examples, but this vagueness is due to the fact that I was talking about two evolutions at the same time: the biological and the technological. Basically the higher-level laws of both are abundant in remarkable analogies. Not only were the first amphibians similar to fishes, the mammals - to small lizards. Also the first airplane, the first automobile, the first radio copied their external appearance from the forms which preceded them. The first birds were feathered flying lizards, the first automobile resembled a coach with guillotined shaft, the airplane was "copied" from the kite (or even from the bird...), the radio - from the earlier invented telephone. Also the dimensions of the prototypes used to be small, and their construction shocked by its primitiveness. Tiny was the first bird, the forebear of the horse or the elephant, the first steam locomotives did not exceed the size of an ordinary cart, and the first electrical locomotive was smaller still. The new way of biological or technological construction rather was pitiful than causing enthusiasm. The very first mechanical vehicles moved slower than the horse-drawn ones, the airplane hardly broke free from the ground, and listening to a radio program was no fun even compared to the tinny voice of the gramophone. Similarly, the first land animals were no good swimmers anymore, but neither were they examples of agile pedestrians yet. The feathered lizard - the archaeopteryx - not so much flew as it fluttered. Only with increasing perfection came the above mentioned "radiation". As the birds conquered the sky, and the carnivorous mammals the steppe, so the combustion engine finally governed the roads, initiating a series of increasingly higher specialized varieties. The automobile not only replaced the mail coach in the "struggle for existence", but also "gave birth" to buses, trucks, bulldozers, fire engines, tanks, off-road vehicles, tankers and dozens of others. The airplane, reigning over the "ecological niche" given by the airspace, probably developed even faster, changing its already fixed shape and drive a few times (the piston engine got replaced by the turbo-engine, then by the turbo-jet, finally the reaction propulsion, the airplane found a serious rival in the helicopter at short distances, etc.). It is also worth noticing that, as the strategy of a predator influences the strategy of its prey, in the same way the "classic" airplane protects itself from the invasion of the helicopter: by the creation of a prototype of planes which, due to the change of direction of the thrust, are able to take off and land vertically. This is a struggle for maximum functional universality, perfectly well known to every evolutionist. Both mentioned means of transport have not yet reached the peak of its development, thus one can say nothing about their later forms. We can do this, however, about the steered balloon, which in the face of the threat by heavier-than-air machines displayed elephantiasis, so typical of pre-decline blossoming of dying evolutionary branches. The last zeppelins of the 30s of our century we can boldly compare to the atlantosauruses and brontosauruses of the Cretaceous period. Similarly the last representatives of the steam-driven freight train locomotives reached huge dimensions before they were replaced by diesel and electrical locomotives. In the search for signs of declining evolution, which tries to escape the threat by secondary radiations, we can also turn our attention to radio and the movie. The competition from television caused an immense "variational radiation" of the radio receivers, the emergence of new "ecological niches", and in this way miniature, pocket, and other, hyperspecialized, devices, like "high fidelity", with stereophonic sound, with integrated hi-fi recorders, etc., came into existence. The movies, however, fighting with television, considerably increased the screen size, and even display a tendency to "surround" the audience (videorama, circarama). Let us add that one can imagine a further development of mechanical cars which replaces the piston engine. When our contemporary cars become replaced by some kind of "hovercraft", it is quite possible that the last descendant of the classic car, surviving in a "lateral branch", will be, let us say, a small combustion-engine driven lawn-mower, and its construction will distantly reflect the epoch of automobilism, similar to certain representatives of lizards on archipelagos in the Indian Ocean which are the last living descendants of the Mesozoic reptiles. The morphologic analogies between the dynamics of bio- and technoevolution, which in a graphic chart can be plotted as a curve that slowly increases, then reaches its peak only to go down again, to decline, those similarities do not cover all convergences between these two large fields. One can find other, even more surprising correspondences. For example, there is a range of very characteristic properties of living organisms whose emergence and survival cannot be explained by adaptation values. One could mention, besides the well known cockscomb, the splendid plumage of certain male birds, e.g., the peacock, the pheasant, and even some sail-like spinal outgrowths of fossilized reptiles [L. Sh. Davitashvili: Teoria Polowogo Otbora. Izd. Ak. Nauk, Moscow 1961]. Analogously the majority of products of a certain technology has apparently useless, nonfunctional properties which cannot be accounted for neither by their working conditions, nor by the goal of their action. What happens here is a highly interesting and funny (in a certain sense) kind of invasion, penetrating deep into biological and technological engineering - in the first case by sexual selection, in the second - by fashion. If we restrict ourselves for clarity to discussing the subject taking the modern car as an example, we find that the main qualities of the car are forced upon the engineer by the current state of technology, thus, let us say, when using rear wheel drive together with a front-mounted engine, the engineer has to place the transmission tunnel of the prop shaft within the interior. But between this dictate by the inviolable scheme of the "organic" structure of the car and the requests and tastes of the customer there is "room for invention", because one can nevertheless offer various shapes and colors of the car, angles and size of the windows, additional decorations, chromium-plating etc., to that customer. The counterpart to product changeability due to the pressure of fashion is given in bioevolution by the unusually broad range of secondary sexual characteristics. These characteristics were primarily the result of accidental changes - mutations - but they became fixed in the following generations, because their owners were privileged sexual partners. Thus the equivalent to a car's "tail", chromium-plated embellishments, fantastically shaped cooling-air entrances, front and rear lights, are mating colors, crests, strange outgrowths and - last but not least - a certain distribution of fat tissue together with such facial features that favor sexual approbation. Of course, the inertia of "sexual fashion" in bioevolution is incomparably larger than in technology, since Nature as a designer cannot change its produced models from year to year. The essence, however, i.e., the characteristic influence of an "impractical", "irrelevant", "ateleological" factor on the shape and individual development of living creatures and products of technology can be found and examined in a huge number of arbitrarily chosen examples. One could find other, even less noticeable similarities between those two large evolutionary trees. Thus, e.g., in bioevolution there exists the phenomenon of mimicry, i.e., the adaptation of the appearance of one species to another, when it turns out to be advantageous for the "imitators" to do so. Nonpoisonous insects may look remarkably like distant, but dangerous species, or they may even "pretend" to be only part of the body of some other creature which has nothing in common with insects - just think of the frightening "cat's eyes" on the wings of certain butterflies. Analogies to mimicry can also be discovered in technoevolution. The lion's share of metal and wrought-iron work of the 19th century was produced under the influence of imitation of botanical forms (iron bridge constructions, railings, lanterns, fences, even the funnel "crowns" of ancient locomotives "imitated" botanical motives). Things of daily use, like biros, lighters, lamps, typewriters, in our times often exhibit a "streamlined" shape, imitating forms which were designed in aircraft construction, in high-speed technology. Admittedly this type of mimicry lacks the deeper reason which exists for its biological equivalent, here we rather have to do with the influence of a key technology on lower-level, secondary technologies, furthermore fashion has something to say as well. Eventually in most cases one cannot decide to what extent a given shape was determined by the offer from the designer - and to what extent by the demand of the customer. For here we have to do with a cycle, in which causes become effects, and effects - become causes, where various positive and negative feedbacks are acting: living organisms in biology and successive industrial products in the technological civilization are only minute parts of those higher-level processes. This statements immediately reveals the origin for the similarity of both evolutions. Both are material processes of almost the same number of degrees of freedom and similar dynamical laws. These processes occur in a self-organizing system, like Earth's biosphere as a whole, or the totality of mankind's technological activities - and such a system as a whole shows particular signs of "progress", i.e., an increase in homeostatic efficiency, which tends to an ultrastable equilibrium as an immediate goal [J. M. Smith: The Theory of Evolution. Penguin Books, 1962]. Reaching for biological examples turns out to be advantageous and fruitful also in our following considerations. Aside from similarities, both evolutions are also characterized by far-reaching differences whose investigation may demonstrate the limitations and weaknesses of such an allegedly perfect Designer, as Nature is supposed to be, as well as unexpected chances (but also dangers) which come with the avalanche-like technological development in human hands. I said "in human hands", because it is not (at least for the time being) devoid of humans, it constitutes a whole only when "filled with humankind", and this is probably the most important difference: for bioevolution is beyond any doubt an amoral process, which certainly cannot be said of technological evolution. Differences 1. The first difference between both evolutions is a genetic one and concerns the problem of the driving forces. Nature is the "originator" of bioevolution, man - of technoevolution. The explanation of the "start" of bioevolution today still causes immense difficulties. The problem of the emergence of life plays an important role in our considerations, for solving it means more than just establishing the cause of a certain historical fact related to the distant past of Earth. We are not talking about that fact in itself, but about its most relevant consequences for the further development of technology. Its development has lead to a situation where further progress will not be possible without exact knowledge about extraordinarily complex phenomena - as complex as life itself. Although we will not have to "imitate" the living cell. We do not imitate the mechanics of the flight of birds, but still we are flying. We do not wish to emulate, but to understand. However, the attempts to understand biogenesis "from the point of view of the engineer" meet huge difficulties. The traditional biology calls in thermodynamics as a competent arbitrator. The latter says that typically things evolve from higher to lower complexity. The emergence of life was the reverse process. Even if we accept, as a general law, the hypothesis of the existence of a "threshold of minimum complexity", the crossing of which not only enables a material system to maintain its actual organization against external perturbations, but even to pass it on, unchanged, to organisms of the next generation, even then such a hypothesis does not yield a genetic explanation. Since at some time, some organism had to be the first to cross that threshold. Therefore the question if this was caused by the so called chance or by causal necessity is of extreme importance. In other words, was the "start" of life an exceptional (like a first prize in a lottery) or a typical phenomenon (like a blank)? Biologists giving their opinion on the abiogenesis of life claim that this had to be a gradual process, a series of stages, where the realization of each successive stage on the way to the primordial cell had its own definite probability. The formation of amino acids in the primeval ocean under the influence of electric discharges, e.g., was entirely probable; the formation of peptides - somewhat less probable, but still with some chance of realization; the spontaneous synthesis of enzymes however, of those catalysts of life, navigators of its biochemical reactions, represents - regarded in this way - a highly unusual (though necessary for the emergence of life) accident. In areas governed by probability we are dealing with statistical laws. Thermodynamics actually represents this type of law. From its point of view the water in the pot on the fire will boil, but not with certainty. There is a chance of the water freezing on the fire, expressed by an admittedly astronomically small probability. Thus arguments of this kind, that even the thermodynamically most improbable phenomena will eventually happen if only we wait patiently enough, and that the evolution of life had enough of that "patience" since it has been going on for billions of years, such arguments sound convincing as long as we do not apply mathematical tools to them. Yes: thermodynamics might swallow even the spontaneous formation of proteins in solutions of amino acids, but it will not allow for abiogenesis of enzymes. Even if the whole Earth were nothing than an ocean of protein solutions, if its radius were 5 times as large as it is in reality, even then this mass would be insufficient for the accidental formation of such highly specialized enzymes which are necessary for the emergence of life. The number of possible enzymes is larger than the number of stars in the whole universe. If the proteins in the primeval ocean had to wait for their spontaneous formation, this could easily have taken an eternity. Hence, in order to explain the realization of a certain stage of biogenesis, one has to resort to postulating a highly improbable event - that "first prize" in the cosmic lottery. Let us be honest: if we all, scientists included, were robots endowed with reason, not creatures made of blood and bones, then there would not be more than a handful of scientists inclined to accept such a probabilistic hypothesis concerning the emergence of life. The fact that there are more is not a result of the general conviction that it is true, but of the simple fact that we are living, therefore yielding a proving, though indirect argument in favor of biogenesis. For two or four billion years are enough time for the formation of the species and their evolution, but not for the emergence of the living cell - through repeated, blind "draws" from the statistical bag of all possibilities. Seen in this way, the subject is not only implausible from the standpoint of scientific methodology (which describes typical, but not accidental phenomena having a flavor of unpredictability), but is at the same time a rather unambiguous judgment dooming to failure all attempts of "life engineering" or even "engineering of very complex systems", since their formation is governed by unusually rare coincidence. Fortunately that approach is incorrect. It is based on the fact that we only know two types of systems: very simple systems, like the machines which we built up to now, and immensely complex systems, like all living creatures. The absence of intermediate links made us cling too desperately to a thermodynamic explanation, not taking into account the gradual manifestation of system laws in systems approaching equilibrium states. If this state is as exactly defined as in the case of a clock and synonymous with the stopping of the pendulum's oscillation, we are lacking the material needed for extrapolation to systems with many dynamic possibilities, like a planet on which biogenesis is starting, or like a laboratory in which scientists are constructing self-organizing systems. Such systems, still relatively simple today, represent those required intermediate links. Their emergence, for example in the form of living organisms, is no "first prize in the lottery of chance", but it represents the manifestation of necessary states of dynamic equilibrium in a system abounding in elements and tendencies of different types. Hence self-organization processes are not exceptional, but typical, and the formation of life is merely one of the many signs of the process of homeostatic organization which is omnipresent in the Cosmos. This does in no way remove the thermodynamic balance of the Universe since this is a global balance which allows for a lot of phenomena such as, e.g., the formation of heavier (and thus more complicated) elements from lighter (and thus simpler) ones. Therefore the "Monte Carlo"-type hypothesis of a cosmic roulette, representing a simple methodological extension of the reasoning which is supported by the knowledge of elementary simple mechanisms, is replaced by the theory of a "cosmic panevolutionism", which turns us from beings sentenced to passive waiting for uncommon coincidences into engineers capable of choosing between the overwhelming number of possibilities which are contained in the preliminarily vague directive of the construction of self-organizing systems of ever increasing complexity. A separate question is how the frequency of the appearance of those postulated "parabiological evolutions" in the cosmos can manifest itself - and whether or not it is necessarily crowned with the appearance of a psyche in our, human sense. But this is the subject of separate considerations which require taking into account the large amount of facts from astrophysical observations. The Great Engineer, Nature, has been performing her experiments for billions of years, creating from the material which is given once and for all (this, however, is another question...) everything that is possible. The Human, son of mother Nature and father Chance, watching this all-embracing activity, has for centuries been questioning the sense of this cosmic, deadly serious, for ultimate, game. Surely - to no avail, should he always remain a questioner. On the other hand, he could start answering himself, taking Nature's intricate secrets and initiating the Technological Evolution according to his own picture. 2. ...11/25/97, to be continued...